by Jane Goodall
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This book is dedicated to Danny, Olly, and Uncle Eric, who created a magic garden during my childhood; and to Judy, Pip, and Wayne, who keep it alive today; to the scientists, naturalists, and traditional healers whose fascination with the Green Kingdom has helped me to understand many of its mysteries; to all those who dare to speak out against “conventional” farming and genetically modified plants and the poisoning of our planet; and to the glorious diversity and resilience of the plants and trees themselves.
Foreword by Michael Pollan
My first reaction upon learning that Jane Goodall was taking a break from animals to write a book about plants was that this was very good news indeed for the plants. Plants don’t get nearly as much ink or respect as the animals do, something I’ve always felt was deeply unfair, if entirely understandable. Animals are much easier for humans to identify with, sharing with us, as they do, such traits as consciousness, emotion, locomotion, and communication skills. You can tell stories about animals that have the same dramatic shape as stories about people, with heroes and villains, journeys and conflicts. That’s not so easily done with plants, which seem simple by comparison and rather opaque.
It is worth remembering that before Jane Goodall came along and introduced us to a society of chimpanzees at Gombe, in Tanzania, even the primates seemed much simpler and more opaque to us—much more difficult for us to identify with. It was her meticulous observation and chronicling of the lives of Mike and Humphrey, of Flo and Gigi and Frodo—all of them chimpanzees—that demonstrated once and for all that animals were far more like us than we had imagined or cared to admit. They, too, made and used tools, learned and passed on cultural information, and formed communities of individuals with distinct “personalities”—a word that in light of her work needs some rethinking. More than any other scientist or writer I can think of, Jane Goodall expanded the circle of human empathy to take in the emotional lives of other creatures.
I’m not sure whether plants have emotional lives exactly, but anyone who reads Seeds of Hope cannot fail to come away thinking that they are far more complicated and interesting creatures than we give them credit for. I suspect the habit of underestimating them has its roots in our self-centered definition of what constitutes complexity or sophistication. We prize things like self-consciousness or abstract reasoning or language simply because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey—the particular tools we evolved to help us cope with living on this earth. Yet the plants have been evolving even longer than we have, evolving their own tools for living, and these are easily as sophisticated as ours, just different. So while we were working hard on locomotion and consciousness, they were getting really, really good at biochemistry, up to and including their mastery of the astonishing trick of eating sunlight and turning it into food. Photosynthesis might be a skill hard for us to identify with, but—you’ve got to admit—it puts something like the opposable thumb, or even trigonometry, right in its place. The world could get by just fine without those little tricks, but without photosynthesis it would be a much, much duller place, lacking, among a great many other things, us.
In the pages of Seeds of Hope, Goodall introduces us to plants capable of the most extraordinary biochemical feats. There are the trees that alert one another to the arrival of an insect pest, causing the entire forest to produce compounds that render the flavor of its leaves unappetizing to the bug. (Who said plants don’t have communication skills?) And though plants may not themselves possess consciousness, at least as we understand it, they do know how to manipulate the consciousness of other supposedly “higher” creatures, manufacturing chemical compounds that can change animal minds in the most striking ways—and thereby get the animals to do the bidding of the plants. We meet plants in this book that are masters of metaphor and simulation: “carrion plants” that mimic the stench of rotten meat to lure insects, and orchids that adorn themselves so as to resemble the hindquarters of female bees. Why? To trick credulous male bees into performing acts of “pseudocopulation” that, unbeknownst to them, are actually acts of pollination. In fact there are so many stories in this book of plants getting the better of animals that you really have to wonder which kingdom of creatures is really calling the shots, even in an enterprise as seemingly humanocentric as “agriculture.” To read Seeds of Hope as a member of the animal kingdom is, among other things, a humbling experience.
In writing about plants, Goodall combines the cozy traditions of English garden writing—the epistolary ease and familiarity with horticulture—with the authority of an intrepid scientist who has spent not just days or weeks but years living in the forest among the trees. She has cultivated that way of being in (and with) nature E. O. Wilson had in mind when he coined the word biophilia. Though the book is steeped in science, Goodall’s feelings for the plants are spiritual—and her concern for their fate in the modern world is forthrightly political.
Seeds of Hope is not just a love letter to the plant world, though it is certainly that. It’s also a call to arms, sounding the alarm about habitat destruction, the violence of industrial agriculture, and the risks of genetic engineering. In our own time, the long, beautiful, and mutually beneficial coevolutionary journey of plants and animals has arrived at a critical new juncture, Goodall suggests, and this gives Seeds of Hope its sense of urgency. Jane Goodall wants nothing less than to expand the circle of human affection once again, make it wide enough to take in the sunlight eaters. For both their sake and our own, let us hope she succeeds.
PART ONE
My Love for the Natural World
Chapter 1
A Childhood Rooted in Nature
Me, at about three years old, setting out to explore the forest. (CREDIT: W. E. JOSEPH, “UNCLE ERIC”)
“Jane Goodall has written a book about plants? Surely not—isn’t she the one who studied chimpanzees in Africa?” I can hear the comments. Indeed, I have been hearing them for the past couple of years as I collected information for this book. Of course I am best known—thanks especially to National Geographic’s magazine articles and documentaries—for the study of the Gombe chimpanzees. In 2010 we celebrated fifty years of research there. But there would be no chimpanzees without plants—nor human beings either, for that matter. And the chimpanzee might never have materialized for me had I not been obsessed, as a child, with stories of the wilderness areas of the planet and, most especially, the forests of Africa.
From my window, as I write in my house in Bournemouth, England, I can see the trees that I used to climb as a child. Up in the branches of one of them, a beech tree, I would read about Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan, and dream about the time when I, too, would live in the forest.
When war broke out in Europe, my father went off to fight for his country against Hitler and the Nazi scourge. This is when I came with my sister and my mother to live with her two sisters, Olly and Audrey, and her mother—known by all as “Danny” (as I could not say “Granny” when I was small)—in this 1872 red-brick Victorian house, with huge sash windows and high ceilings. The Birches.
We had little money between us—and anyway, it was wartime rationing, tightened belts, and so on. But we had a bi
g garden (or yard) with a lawn where moss insisted on growing, and a good many trees. There was my beech and three magnificent silver birch trees, with their smooth, silvery trunks and graceful branches. There was a mountain ash, or rowan, glorious with red berries in autumn, and two Spanish chestnut trees—one of which produced minute chestnuts each year, hardly worth the bother of opening the prickly cases, while the other—which we named “Nooky”—had been maimed. The upper half of his trunk and branches had been sawed off so that he was, in effect, little more than a twenty-foot-tall stump. A stump that sprouted prolific branches that reached up to the sky for another twenty feet or more, as though to compensate for the missing trunk. Nooky never produced a flower, let alone a chestnut.
All around the garden was a tall hedge of privet interspersed with the occasional trimmed holly tree. It was not a “bright” garden, because it was shaded by two big fir trees and five pines, and there were rhododendron bushes and ivy all over the place. And so, although Danny and Olly worked hard trying to grow vegetables for the war effort, what with the shade and the sandy soil (we are just a ten-minute walk from the ocean), and the acidity caused by the rhododendrons and pines, it was only runner beans and Danny’s parsley and mint that really flourished.
But some things grew. All year-round, except in the very cold months, there were daisies all over the lawn. I wonder how many daisy chains we made each year. And dandelions appeared everywhere—almost impossible to dig up with their long, long roots. Every spring we watched for the first snowdrops pushing through soil still hard from winter frosts. They were followed by crocus and then, as the ground warmed, the primroses, foxgloves, bluebells, buttercups, and Wordsworth’s “cloud of dancing daffodils.” And all the time the buds on the trees were growing fat and bursting into tiny infant leaves. Then came the glorious awakening of the white blossom on the hawthorn, the rich pink red of the may, the bright yellow of the laburnum, and the purple of the lilac. And, best of all for me, lilies of the valley with their heady fragrance that, today, poignantly reminds me of those childhood days.
Later, as spring changed to summer, Olly’s roses began to bloom, one after the other, as did her azalea that grew beside her beloved rhubarb plant, and Danny’s special dark-red peonies surrounded by her precious runner beans. And the leaves on the trees, fed by the rising sap, reached their full maturity and worked each day to change sunlight into food for the tree or shrub that had nurtured their growing.
My love of plants and trees was heightened by hours of roaming, together with my dog Rusty, the wild cliffs that drop down to the sandy beach below. They are intersected by a series of dry streambeds that are known, in these parts, by an archaic French word—chine. Our house stands on Durley Chine Road. Every spring, gorse bushes blossom into a blaze of yellow on the lower slopes of our chine, and tiny sweet-scented violets appear in one spot. I used to try to find the very first tiny purple flowers to take to Olly. Violets were her passion.
When the rhododendrons bloom in the summer, the steep sides of Middle Chine are glorious with the mauve color of their exotic flowers—they grew thickly in our school grounds as well. Danny had a favorite outside the kitchen window that had rich-red blooms.
Rusty and I spent as much time in the garden as we could. (CREDIT: JANE GOODALL)
Autumn was a time I loved. The verdant green of summer changed to soft yellows and gold, and here and there a splash of red leaves. Gradually the leaves fell and the ground was carpeted with their glowing colors until they rotted into rich loam or were swept from the lawn and burned on a bonfire at the bottom of the garden, where we baked potatoes in the hot ashes.
On the cliffs there were a few oak and beech trees, but mostly a host of pine trees that were planted on the original heath land in the massive landscaping project that started early in the nineteenth century. There were a couple of ancient Spanish chestnuts that, while they did not produce the large chestnuts sold commercially, were two or three times the size of those in our garden, and we loved to roast them around the grate of our small sitting-room fire.
During my childhood, Danny’s one son, my uncle Eric, would bring us nuts from the huge and ancient walnut tree in his garden, and he brought apples too. We would pick blackberries on the cliff, and Danny would make blackberry-and-apple pies. She also made elderberry wine from the clusters of black fruits from our own elder. It was nonalcoholic, but the very fact that it was called “wine” gave us children a sense of being grown up when we drank it at Christmastime in grown-up wineglasses.
I have no doubt that growing up in this idyllic home and landscape of England was the foundation of my lifelong love of the plant kingdom and the natural world. The other day, when I was looking through a box of childhood treasures that had been lovingly preserved by my mother, I came across a “Nature Notebook” in which the twelve-year-old Jane, with great attention to detail, had sketched and painted a number of local plants and flowers. Beside each drawing or watercolor I had handwritten a detailed description of the plant, based on my careful observations and probably a bit of book research.
A painting from my childhood, “Nature Notebook.” This is a primrose, one of my favorite flowers from our garden. (CREDIT: JANE GOODALL)
This was not a schoolbook. This wasn’t done for an assignment. I just loved to draw and paint and write about the plant world. In a sense, I began writing Seeds of Hope over sixty years ago!
Of course, even as I was becoming increasingly aware of plants—well, trees really—as individual beings, I was, at the same time, learning ever more about the animals. I especially loved the barn owls that would punctuate the night with their eerie calls, the bullfinches with their glowing red-pink breast feathers, and the herring and black-headed gulls who flew low over the garden, screaming and waiting for one of us to go out and throw them bread crusts. Blackbirds, song thrushes, robins, and many kinds of tits nested in our tall, tangled hedges and in the trees. There were still one or two red squirrels left on the cliff back then, but the gray invaders were rapidly taking over the real estate. Occasionally we took a bus to the New Forest, woods interspersed with moors covered in heather, where there were New Forest ponies and deer, and if we were lucky, we might glimpse a fox.
And let me not forget the insects. In those days there were buzzings and hummings and chirpings of bugs of all sorts. In the daytime there were the shimmering, fluttering wings of butterflies (surely they were originally “flutterbys” until some medieval scholar got his f’s and b’s confused?). Then in the evening came the irritating high-pitched whine of the mosquitoes, and at night the moths arrived, attracted by the white blossoms and night fragrance of the syringa and white lilac—and, unfortunately, by our lights.
There were Olly and Danny’s enemies, the slugs and snails. My sister, Judy, and I loved snails and often kept them so that we could race them. Years later I learned that snail racing was at one time a popular pastime among elderly gentlemen in France! Our garden had its full quota of those invaluable little helpers, the earthworms, eating their way through the soil, aerating it, an important part of the ecosystem. I once took a whole handful to bed with me when I was just eighteen months old. My wise mother, instead of scolding, told me they would die, for they needed the earth, and together we took them back to a flowerbed.
And then there were the bees, the pollinators so absolutely essential to the gardener. I watched them for hours—honeybees flying busily from flower to flower, the “breadbaskets” on their legs gradually filling with bright-yellow pollen as they performed that all-important task of pollination. The big, furry-coated bumblebees, jet black with one or two bright-yellow stripes on the abdomen—who really did “bumble” from flower to flower—seemed almost lazy by comparison with the honeybees. It was fascinating to see them push their way into the foxglove flowers and watch as the blooms trembled while the invisible visitor probed for nectar.
When I got my first job—as a secretary—in Oxford, I was able to explore a different part of Eng
land. Every weekend I set off on my bicycle into the surrounding countryside, exploring lanes and hedgerows, which, in those halcyon days of the mid-1950s, were a riot of wildflowers. I would leave my bike and wander through the fields, past grazing cows (keeping a wary eye out for the occasional bull), and getting familiar with cow parsley (or Queen Anne’s lace), campion, speedwell, ragged robin, and the mauve sweet-scented clover that was so beloved by bees—and cattle and horses too.
Sometimes in the evening I would hire a little canoe for an hour and paddle, silently, past bulrushes and reed beds, nosing in toward the bank, where I could be hidden in a cave of green under the trailing branches of a huge weeping willow to watch the mallard ducks. I remember that a couple of verses of a very different sort of poem would sometimes repeat themselves in my mind in a somewhat annoying way—they came from one of my favorite childhood books, The Wind in the Willows.
All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!
Ducks’ tails, drakes’ tails,
Yellow feet a-quiver,
Yellow bills all out of sight
Busy in the river!
I could only paddle about a mile upriver—partly because I could only afford the canoe for an hour, but also because one then came to a stretch of river that was forbidden to women—named Parson’s Pleasure, it was reserved for gentlemen who desired to disport themselves in their “birthday suits.” I knew of girls who would hide for hours in thick undergrowth to get a glimpse of certain body parts, and I suspect the men were well aware of those immodest eyes!
Not only did my mother preserve my “Nature Notebooks,” she also saved the only three copies ever produced of “The Alligator Magazine,” written at about the same time as I was painting local wildflowers. They were put together for the benefit of the four members of “The Alligator Club”—me and Judy and the two friends who came to stay almost every holiday, Sally and Susie. I was the eldest, and bossed the others around and planned the games we would play and the things we would do.